“You got a call for 555? Are you sure? How long ago? Did they say who was calling?” He signaled to a military officer standing near the desk.
A flurry of activity followed, but to no purpose. If someone had thought to explain the situation to the operator beforehand she might have been able to get some information from the caller. When they finally broke it to her that all this fuss was about the terrorists who were ransoming the world, she collapsed in tears. Her family lived in the lowlands north of Valparaiso. When the tidal waves came, her village would be gone. She didn’t look forward to telling her father she’d missed the chance to help capture the terrorists.
At the end of the information chain, Grimes and Hayes heard about the call half an hour later from a Chilean attaché who’d found them in the hotel bar.
The general was livid. “It took you a half-hour to get this to us?” he bellowed. “What the hell will you people do if you ever have to fight a war?”
The attaché hovered at the table, embarrassed and confused.
“I don’t recall you telling anyone where we’d be, General,” said Grimes softly.
Hayes looked up at the attaché and apologized.
The man smiled. “Thank you, sir. Everyone is upset.”
Hayes nodded and raised his coffee cup. “Well, here’s to one slippery-assed piece of shit named Rudolfo Suarez. May he rot in Hel.”
“Si, General,” said the attaché.
“Hear, hear,” said everyone at the table.
Henry Scott Gibbs of the Antarctic sat helplessly, fixed in place. Like Sarah, he was happy to be in the company of these people, but overwhelmed by the strangeness of the situation. An alert had turned into a fruitless exercise, and for the moment they seemed no closer to saving the world.
Shep lifted his head next to Henry’s lap. His wet nose and panting mouth appeared from under the tablecloth, which draped his eyes like a mask. Sarah looked down at him and giggled.
Grimes noticed where she was looking and grinned.
“Eyes front, you two. Both hands on the table. We’re on alert.”
“I’m laughing at his puppy, you filthy thing,” she snarled.
“Is that what you call it?”
Hayes coughed and blew coffee all over the table.
By midafternoon Suarez and Remo were well on their way towards the mountains. Remo had opened the window of the van and hung his arm in the breeze. He was still wondering what was bothering the boss, who had said nothing for the last fifteen minutes but just sat there staring blankly into space, lost in thought.
When Suarez was on the move, Remo was on the clock. A bodyguard, first and foremost, guards a man’s body. The mind, it is presumed, takes care of itself. So, when the question of what was eating at his boss began to eat at him, Remo had to find a diversion. He reached into his shirt for cigarettes.
“Mind the breeze?” he asked the boss as he snapped his Zippo into flame.
“Hadn’t noticed.”
“Radio?” said Remo, reaching for the dash.
“Something upbeat,” replied Suarez distractedly. But he hardly heard his own words. Deep in the recesses of his mind, he was deeply troubled. Something had happened to Trevor, he was growing slowly convinced, despite his earlier confidence that all was well. But he couldn’t imagine what.
Remo puffed on his cigarette as they moved on through poor but orderly neighbourhoods full of apartment buildings and adobe houses with tiled roofs. Soon parched natural scenery began to replace urban sprawl. After another half-hour they were seeing open farmland and savannah as the van moved to higher ground.
Suarez remained quiet. He had learned long ago to trust no one but himself. He listened to the wisdom of the wild condor, his shadow spirit — the ancient entity that secretly whispered knowledge to him, an entity that was aloof, aloft and serene. Suarez believed he could launch his inner self and see with the eyes of the bird. Now, from a great height, the condor spirit called an alarm to him, and pointed its wing towards Santiago.
“Something is not right, Remo,” he said, breaking his silence.
“My driving getting to you again?” answered Remo with a nervous smile.
Suarez looked at him and smiled. “No, not that. I think something is wrong in Santiago. The condor cries.”
Remo didn’t bat an eyelid. He’d heard the odd turn of phrase many times. It was his boss’s lofty way of saying he smelled a rat. And he had a nose for rats. Remo and Trevor had had to take care of many rats in the service of the Sun God.
“Trevor?” said Remo.
“Yes. Something bad has happened to them all.”
“But everything is going like clockwork. You’re thinking about the military trucks at the hotel? I…”
“Remo,” said Suarez through clenched teeth.
The bodyguard’s lower lip disappeared under his broad red moustache as he shut his mouth. “Sorry, boss.”
Suarez once more ignored his companion. His eyes returned to the snowy Andean peaks looming before them. He struggled to detach himself from fear and focus on his power. His thumb began to rotate a large ring he had been given by his grandfather on turning sixteen. The same year his grandfather had died. Remo had seen the boss perform that nervous little action hundreds of times. It meant the boss had “left the building”.
At last Suarez spoke again.
“Trevor is alive, but someone else is dead.”
He sighed deeply, folded his arms in front of his belly, and fell silent behind closed eyes.
Remo shivered, and closed the window. He thought of the last moments with Trevor in room 555. Trevor had wanted to see a girl before returning to the Hacienda. He had promised Suarez he’d be around for the big show.
Rudy had said simply, “You will be, Trevor. See you tomorrow.”
If Trevor failed to arrive at the Hacienda, the boss’s “visions” would once more be batting a thousand.
Remo looked at his watch. He reckoned that within three hours they’d be at the sky dome Suarez had built for one of his companies, TransAm Optical. To the outside world the Hacienda, as the boss called it, was merely the HQ of an optical engineering firm — and it was that as well — but to Suarez it was also a fortress in the sky. There they had assembled the bombs that had gone into the ice. There the Deep Ice plan had been designed, built and launched.
Only Trevor and Remo knew it all — the details that could destroy the Prince of the Sun God.
Nine
Trevor Hodges imagined he was in a cell or some other small dark room. But he couldn’t see for the bandages that covered his eyes. And he couldn’t move for the casts that enclosed his arm and leg. He hurt everywhere when he tried to move at all.
He thought he heard the call of a bird, but perhaps it was just the ringing in his ears. He thought of Rudy, and wondered if his boss would be proud that Trevor hadn’t talked to the butcher who had tortured him in the hotel. And, when he had finally broken from the pain, he’d claimed Rudy had gone to La Paz or Arica to be with family. Had it been worth it? he wondered as he searched the dark, pain-soaked recesses of his memory. Yes. It had been best to lie. If the world didn’t kill him, then Rudy surely would if Trevor gave the game away. And Rudy wouldn’t kill him humanely, like the courts of the free world. Rudy would make sure of that.
With that thought for comfort, Trevor drifted back into drugged unconsciousness. His mind reached into the past, to the tunnels in Colombia. In his dream he dug and burrowed like a mole buried in a collapsed tunnel, hacking at the mud that surrounded him with a jungle knife.
Some time later he awoke to pain again. Someone had stuck him with a needle.